Tag Archives: bakersfield

The guy’s blues-tinged, hyper-twang guitar work and deft production and arrangement skills helped launch Dwight Yoakam’s career in the 1980s, bringing the edgy “Bakersfield Sound” back into mainstream favor.

Folks who visit the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum’s Bakersfield exhibit can learn all about Anderson and his myriad contributions to one of America’s most popular art forms.

So you’ve got to figure a guy like that is enjoying the luxury such successes afford.

“Every Monday, I play a Moose Lodge,” says Anderson.

Moose Lodge? Jeez, I hope the money is good.

“I don’t get paid for that,” Anderson says. “But I am consumed with making music, and I needed a home base to work and get better as a front guy, as a singer, and as the guy talking to the audience between songs. The Moose Lodge serves my purpose. My main thing, always, is that I want to play guitar in front of people.”

Fortunately, Moose are people.

Anderson’s Moose gig is in California, where he lives, but he’ll be in Nashville on Saturday to play neither the cavernous Bridgestone Arena nor the historically cool Ryman. Instead, he’ll take the stage at East Nashville’s plucky little Family Wash.

And instead of replicating his famed guitar riffs from Yoakam smashes “Guitars, Cadillacs” or “Please, Please Baby” (guitar parts that modern hit-making guitar players like Brad Paisley have long since committed to memory), he’ll be singing and playing original blues music.

“I’m not the same guy that played ‘Please, Please Baby,’ ” he says. “I’ve grown so much as a player, and I play from the point of having nothing to prove, only playing for the song and to please myself.”

Honoring the traditional

Anderson, born and raised in Detroit, met Yoakam in 1983. Working in Southern California, they arrived at a visceral traditionalism, at once fierce and reverent.

“Dwight and I were two pieces of a puzzle that fit perfectly together,” Anderson says. “The California country of Buck Owens and Merle Haggard was common ground, but I worked to get a guitar style that was different than what my heroes, like Albert Lee and James Burton, played. I played Dwight Music, tailored for him.”

By 1984, “Dwight Music” was the rage in California clubs, and two years later it caught on nationwide.

Anderson’s guitar was a signature element of Yoakam’s first Top 10 single, a cover of Johnny Horton’s “Honky Tonk Man,” and of every other Yoakam release until 2003, when the two men ended their partnership.

Beyond Yoakam, Anderson became a central figure in Los Angeles’ country and roots rock revivals, producing compilations called “A Town South of Bakersfield” that helped Lauderdale, Lucinda Williams, Rosie Flores, Randy Weeks and others find audiences.

“Pete gave me my first break, really believed in me and helped so many other people,” Lauderdale says. “When I heard Dwight’s first record, I thought, ‘This is a different sound for country music.’ They had huge success, that spilled over into the local scene, and he helped create a movement out there. He was a rebel who really shook things up. And now with this new record, he’s taken his playing to a whole different level and trying different things.”

It’s music that works well at the Moose Lodge, and it finds Anderson in stronger, truer singing voice than on previous recordings: His work ethic and drive to improve extends beyond the guitar.

“I’ve been working on singing, really hard,” he says. “It’s been about finding my own voice. I grew up infatuated with trying to sing like George Jones, which no one can do. I had to find a way to sing that wasn’t contrived, and my voice has gotten more authoritative. It’s just like with playing guitar: If you’re trying to do it the way somebody else already did it, you’ll never be better than second-best.”

Anderson doesn’t go for the second-best thing. Not enough reward in that, and he’s in the reward-reaping portion of his career.

We might rest awhile, inside our tricked-out mansion with the replica of our Country Music Hall of Fame plaque and the dozens of remarkable guitars and the sparkle-smiled wife. We might ponder the fires that used to burn inside us, and ruminate on the sprinter’s pace that led us to Hall of Fame induction at age 51.

We might chuckle at a country music world inhabited by people seeking — aching, in fact — to do what we’ve already done.